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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Human societies have relied on eye-witness testimony since Cain and Abel. Sure, you can study it and discover that humans are unreliable (film at 11!) but it's silly to think that we are going to have trials and testimony and leave out eye witnesses. What's important about our trial system and juries-of-peers is that the average person feels the system is doing its best to find the truth so that it's not necessary to form vigilantes. Our system is overall pretty good, better than asking all the people who show up at a crime scene or later to protest.

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Cain and Abel didn’t have DNA evidence, security cameras, digital forensics, etc. It’s right to reevaluate in light of the modern world.

Some eyewitness testimony is acceptable. People can be reliably expected to recognize people who they know. If a woman’s mother said that she saw the boyfriend hit her daughter, that’s an acceptable form of eyewitness testimony.

The kind of eyewitness testimony that should not be accepted, is when the person in question was not previously known to the witness. This kind of evidence has been proven time and time again to be entirely unreliable and should be considered no more compelling than lie detectors.

BTW Biblical eye witness testimony requires the witness to know they person they are identifying.

So, fsckboy, what we are doing today is not exactly what has been done since Cain and Abel, we took the ancient idea of eye witness and extended it beyond where it is reliable.

Biblical eyewitness testimony also requires multiple witnesses:

> One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.

Deuteronomy 19:15 KJV. https://bible.com/bible/1/deu.19.15.KJV

Witnessing falsely was rightly a very big deal to them. It's one of the Ten Commandments, right up there with worshipping idols or committing murder. And according to the following verses of this passage, anyone who witnesses falsely will receive the exact same punishment that the accused would have received.

BTW I referenced the time of Cain and Abel as metonymy for "early humans", not advocacy for the Bible. While the Bible(s) contain interesting and thoughtful ideas about how a functioning legal system could be constructed, in terms of advocacy I'd advocate incorporating enlightenment innovations such as the US bill of rights, etc.

This is a detestable way of disagreeing.

That's his name on hn!!

I just realized it looks like I'm calling him a bad name!

Lmao - I scrolled up to check but I must have missed my alignment.

Edited, and my apologies.

> Cain and Abel didn’t have DNA evidence, security cameras, digital forensics, etc. It’s right to reevaluate in light of the modern world.

you are hopelessly naive if you think the court system could operate only on technology the way you are suggesting. Nowhere did I even hint we should not use physical evidence.

Wouldn't proximity and time be rather important? Seeing someone briefly from a distance, in a traumatic and stressful moment, could easily lead to mistaken identification. On the other hand, the Nuremberg trials relied on eyewitnesses to identify people guilty of genocide who were trying hard to disguise their appearance, and this was possible because the witnesses had been in relatively close proximity to the accused for a long period of time.

Just like an AI can't make a perfectly accurate 3D replica of a face from a single 2D image, the human brain can't. But that doesn't mean it can't get closer and closer with more data.

It seems to me that the real problem is not eyewitness testimony itself, but the methods used to validate the degree of certainty behind it.

I think the parent agrees, hence:

> when the person in question was not previously known to the witness

What I'm taking issue with is the word "previously".

"Previously" implies a family member or neighbor. But if you were caught and tortured by someone you didn't previously know for awhile, you would still probably identify them pretty accurately.

>But if you were caught and tortured by someone you didn't previously know for awhile, you would still probably identify them pretty accurately.

If that was your only interaction with them, I doubt it. You're likely in the most stressful situation of your life, memorizing what a person looks like may not be high on your list of priorities.

There's the famous Ronald Cotton case where a woman was raped and consciously tried to memorize their attackers face. She proceeded to pick an innocent man out of two lineups until a decade later DNA evidence proved his innocence. The actual perpetrator was also in the lineup, and she swore she had never seen him.

There is always the possibility the real perpetrator said "don't help the police catch me. If you do, then my friends will murder your family.".

Many of the cases of mistaken memory might simply be 'deliberate forgetting'

If you're threatened the "right" answer would be to say you don't recognize anyone in the lineup. Not accuse an innocent person.

And we know of many cases where eyewitness accounts are wrong purely because human memory kinda sucks. Maybe some people are lying about what they know, but that doesn't make eyewitness accounts more reliable.

The logical endpoint of this argument is that no one can be convicted for genocide without DNA evidence, regardless of how many eyewitnesses saw that person executing people and can identify them on sight.

I find this unacceptable.

[edit] There's something called a preponderance of evidence. One eyewitness may or may not be able to provide that alone, e.g., "he has a tattoo of a dolphin on his penis". Multiple witnesses in tandem can add to the preponderance of evidence based solely on eyewitness accounts. Yes, it's worth it to free ten criminals to prevent convicting an innocent person; but if we accept that as a starting point, it's also immoral to discount witnesses or victims. Using one person who wrongly accused someone of rape to corroborate the idea that people are incapable of identifying the people who raped them is, frankly, gaslighting rape victims.

> The logical endpoint of this argument is that no one can be convicted for genocide without DNA evidence, regardless of how many eyewitnesses saw that person executing people and can identify them on sight.

There are other forms of evidence that a genocide took place other than eyewitness testimony (orders, technical plans, the testimony of subordinates, physical evidence of mass killings). You would hope that a trial on crimes against humanity would have more than just eyewitness testimony.

> I find this unacceptable.

I also find it unacceptable for someone to be convinced based entirely on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony, only to discover they were innocent decades later.

> [edit] There's something called a preponderance of evidence.

"Preponderance of the evidence" (meaning that it is more likely than not) is a lower bar than "beyond reasonable doubt" (which means what it says on the tin). What you described (having multiple corroborating witnesses) is actually not what preponderance of evidence means.

I think this is unnecessarily pedantic. If the crime was over a prolonged period of time or on multiple instances with the same witness present, then you eventually become familiar with the perpetrator.

The original commenter obviously meant that a witness should be reasonably familiar with the person, whether that be from knowing the person prior to any crime or, in rare cases like kidnappings/torture/etc., during the prolonged period of time with the accused. It's not like we're writing legislature ourselves here; those rare cases probably just didn't come to mind when the original commenter wrote their comment. Informal internet commentary need not be so needlessly scrutinized.

But if we really want to be pedantic with your example, you would become familiar with the person from the "previous" torture sessions.

>Human societies have relied on eye-witness testimony since Cain and Abel.

pretty sure Cain and Abel relied on having an omniscient Lord going around checking in on people https://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/GEN+4...

to quote:

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" "I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"

The LORD said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.

It is true that trials are imperfect.

They are an imperfect approximation of an ideal truth finding endeavour implemented by imperfect humans. That doesn't mean that the imperfections are a feature, it means that as time goes on society should work towards making more accurate approximations of this truth finding process.

Just as we have done away with things like expert testimony on phrenology, cruentation, or trial by ordeal there may come a time when we do away with witness testimony or restrict the kinds of things we allow witnesses to testify about, like we already do with hearsay.

> [I]t’s silly to think that we are going to have trials and testimony and leave out eye witnesses. What's important about our trial system and juries-of-peers is that the average person feels the system is doing its best to find the truth so that it's not necessary to form vigilantes.

Have you considered that perhaps we’ve reached (or are approaching) the point where trials with eye witness testimony are undermining the trial system by making the average person feel the system isn’t doing it’s best to find the truth? If a method is hopelessly unreliable at finding the truth and people know it’s hopelessly unreliable at finding the truth and we continue to employ the hopelessly unreliable method as a means to find the truth it’s “silly” to think that the public would observe the process and conclude its “doing its best to find the truth”.

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